Chapter Two #2
“Stat-ten Island,” the immaculately dressed black man at the center of the table repeated slowly, with perfect, clipped diction, possibly the first person in history to pronounce it with two t’s.
“That explains the accent,” he added, tenting his fingers delicately, his nails longer and smoother than any guy’s Danny had ever seen.
Of everyone in the room, this man made Danny squirm the most. His face was angular, with sharp, thin eyebrows that made him look like he’d just caught you trying your first cigarette in the church parking lot.
He wore a raspberry-jam-colored jacket over a thin black sweater, so tight that when he breathed, it reminded Danny of a python he’d seen at the Staten Island Zoo, slowly digesting a mouse that the keepers had dropped live into its enclosure.
(Parents had complained, but Danny’s classmates thought it was sick in a good way.) With his alligator shoes and a glossy bald head and those long, shining fingers, he made Danny feel, somehow, even more underdressed—even more unprepared.
“Sssso,” the man slithered, his S slicing through the air between them like an arrow. “Why do you want to transfer here?”
“Oh man. Um.”
Danny’s head swirled with a thousand reasons.
’Cuz the guys at his school were dickheads?
’Cuz the priests were assholes? ’Cuz he was getting smarter while other guys his age were getting bigger?
’Cuz his Ma couldn’t afford the tuition anymore?
’Cuz the only time he felt close to not being invisible was on Christmas Eve after the dishes were cleared and his Aunt Ro played the piano and they sang her favorite Bing Crosby songs and his Nonni always had tears in her eyes?
“St. Pete’s is just…not my thing,” Danny said.
“Not your…thing,” the man repeated, fixing him with a formidable stare. He blinked slowly, his face a portrait of disinterest. “Well then, let’s start with your monologue. Begin when you’re ready.”
Danny filled his lungs with air and gave his fingers a little shake.
He’d prepared for this moment for the last three weeks, and he knew what he had to do.
It was time to put that hard work into action, all those nights spent reciting lines into the bathroom mirror, practicing every beat and breath for maximum impact.
He looked down at the masking tape X on the floor, closed his eyes, counted one, two, three, then brought his face up with a mischievous grin.
“A looper, you know? A caddy, a looper, a jock.”
Danny’s body curled in transformation as he recited his lines, taking on the persona of a golf course groundskeeper.
He imagined himself in the fuzzy soft focus of his ancient TV set, delivering every sarcastic one-liner with off-the-wall eccentricity.
He jutted out his chin and puffed out his chest like the guys he’d seen on the football team at St. Pete’s, gripping the diamonds of the chain-link fence and squawking at the girls passing by on their bikes.
His voice filled the room, explaining that he’d been assigned the Dalai Lama as one of his golfers, making sure to lay hard into the L in Lama for comedic effect.
“And do you know what the Lama says?” Danny asked with a smirk, readying himself for the biggest laugh line of the speech. “Gunga galunga…gunga, gunga lagunga.”
Silence.
This was normally the part where his father would slap the television remote to his thigh, exploding into laughter and pointing at the TV. “This fuggin’ guy!”
Despite the lull, Danny soldiered on, getting to his favorite section of the monologue, the part where the Dalai Lama predicts that on his deathbed, the caddy will end up penniless, but will attain complete and utter consciousness.
Danny had rehearsed this part a million times.
He brought his thumb and forefingers together and waved them gently across his body, his best approximation of Tibetan monk enlightenment.
He breathed in slowly and closed his eyes for three seconds, four seconds, five seconds, then dropped the gesture and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort,’ ” Danny said, rounding his way to the big finish. “And he says, ‘There won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’
“So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”
Four pairs of eyes looked back from the other side of the table, each the size of hubcaps.
“And, uh, scene,” Danny added.
It was the python man who spoke first.
“What…what was that from?” he asked.
“Caddyshack,” Danny said, slowly beginning to suspect that the four luminaries of the American theatre sitting across from him weren’t necessarily familiar with his father’s favorite eighties sex comedy about a gopher who destroys a golf course.
“You know? Bill Murray?”
“Oh…,” the snake trailed off, “…kay.”
Danny chewed the inside of his cheek as he watched the teachers shuffle their papers in front of them for what felt like an hour, like whichever one of them spoke first would have to buy them all lunch.
“Danny, why don’t you sing something for us?
” a warm, new voice chimed in brightly, as if Danny and the admissions panel hadn’t just come to a draw in a competition to see who could be the most embarrassed for him.
It was from the young woman on the far right side of the table who, up until this moment, had remained silent.
She was black and—not that Danny had ever thought this about a teacher before—beautiful, with a frictionless smile and hair pulled up into a high ponytail tied with a jewel-colored scarf.
With her baggy silk blouse and fringed suede vest, she seemed way too young and way too cool to be a teacher.
Was this how all teachers looked when they started out, until years in education warped them into the gristly nuns who ruled St. Pete’s with an iron fist?
“You can give your sheet music to Jerry,” the woman said, nodding to an elderly man hunched over an upright piano in the corner of the room who had apparently borne silent witness to Danny’s Caddyshack humiliation as well.
“Sheet…music?” Danny asked quietly.
“Your sheet music for the song you’ve prepared,” the teacher with the warm voice responded, as if politely explaining the concept to a small child.
Danny searched his brain, yanking open a million empty filing cabinets.
“You know,” she said, sounding a little less confident in his comprehension skills, holding up a few pages that lay on her table covered in printed music notes. “Like this?”
“Oh.” Danny breathed a sigh of relief. “No, I’ve got it all up here,” he said, pointing to his head.
“No, uh…” She shifted in her seat, looking over to her colleagues.
“He didn’t bring sheet music?” the vampire woman gruffed, more of a comment than a question.
“I…,” Danny muttered, holding up his empty hands.
“Mr. Victorio,” the python man snapped after an interminable pause, Danny’s chest tightening as if he really were caught in the snake’s grip. “Do you know how many students are accepted into the drama department every year? Thirty. Do you know how many audition? Two hundred and fifty.
“And you’re a transfer student. Or, rather, you wish to be.”
The man’s cold, unblinking glare made it crystal clear what he made of Danny’s “wish.”
“Some years, we take three. Other years…zero.”
A stream of sweat trickled down the back of Danny’s polo. With each breath he took, he could feel the python constricting tighter and tighter.
“Sssso, you’re telling us that you deserve a spot here more than the two hundred and forty-nine other would-be students, each of whom managed to remember to bring sheet music with them?
And whose monologues were excerpted from the oeuvres of Ibsen and Chekhov instead of…
Bill Murray?” the python said, his voice dripping with disdain. “Is that a fair assessment?”
Danny’s cheeks burned radiator hot. I’m such a fucking idiot.
Who was he kidding? He should leave right now.
Six minutes to the subway platform, twenty-five to the terminal, thirty on the ferry, and twenty-eight more on the bus.
What would it have cost him, really? Two subway tokens, a few wasted hours, and fifty lines of scripture in detention?
But just as he was about to sprint for the door, the warm voice piped up.
“Why don’t you just do it a cappella?” she said. “You know, without Jerry? Just by yourself.”
A cappella, Danny repeated in his head, feeling the strange, percussive words forming in his mouth.
“Yeah,” Danny said, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I could do that.”
“Great,” she said with a smile. “Whenever you’re ready, Danny.”
As he took in a breath, Danny thought back to his room at his dead uncle’s place on Port Richmond Avenue, the tiny six-by-eight with lime-green carpet that still smelled like cat piss and the air mattress that would always deflate by morning.
He thought about his mother and the Pontiac doors closing with a weak ting.
He thought about broken dishes and car alarms and late-night sobbing from the living room, not quite drowned out by a blaring episode of Melrose Place.
He thought about sirens and banging and screaming and cursing and screeching tires and dial tones and static.
And then he thought about music. About the tap-tap-tap of a conductor’s baton and the spearmint feeling that entered his body whenever an overture played through his headphones. Then he thought about light.
And then he thought about nothing.
The lyrics poured out, strong and steady as a sudden downpour.
The song was from one of his favorite cast recordings in Uncle Richie’s collection.
He wasn’t Danny Victorio from Staten Island anymore.
He was a boy named Tony, singing to no one in particular, sensing that something, someone, was out there, just around the corner, about to change everything that he thought he knew.
The song vaulted into the audition room, curling around his fingers and ankles and weaving its way through the shoelace holes in his sneakers.
As he rounded the corner to the second verse, Danny felt his heels lift from the ground, then his toes, until he was floating above the black painted floor.
He felt himself leaving the room, soaring high above the school, above the rectangle park and the Tinkertoy bridges and hot dog carts and Coca-Cola billboards and macaroni-yellow cabs.
He sang until he ran out of words, until there wasn’t any music left, until he drifted back to earth, his feet landing gently on the masking tape X.
Maybe tonight…
Maybe tonight…
Danny exhaled and looked up to his panel of judges, his final falsetto note evaporating into the air like vapor.
He searched their faces for some kind of clue, a smile, a grimace, but they were inscrutable.
He wondered if he was supposed to just leave, if this was how it always went in auditions, but something kept his feet glued to the floor.
The teachers looked to one another, then nodded.
“Thank you, Danny,” the young woman said, finally.
And then it was over.